Sharing ArchiMate Models

Are you sharing your ArchiMate models and design patterns with the rest of the ArchiMate modelling community? Or are you hiding them in company silos? What are good and useful examples of ArchiMate models currently in circulation? How does one start with the ArchiMate language as a beginner?

Interesting questions. I often get emails from newcomers to the language asking for examples of ArchiMate models, or snippets of models, to repurpose as design patterns of best practice for learning and training, or to use as a starting point in real-world modelling scenarios. What currently exists in the public domain? Well, there are some excellent and helpful blogs and books with examples of ArchiMate modelling patterns, and there’s always the old favourite, Archisurance (which is probably getting a bit long in the tooth now), and maybe some I’ve missed, but I can’t find a whole lot out there.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place to share ArchiMate models and parts of models, say, in a public repository? And even better if this repository was searchable by keywords and properties, and maybe even showing a thumbnail preview of the diagrams in the model? And perhaps also supporting user ratings and comments? And, of course, the model files should be in The Open Group’s ArchiMate Exchange Format, so one could open them in any ArchiMate tool.

Well, I did take a stab at this some time ago by creating a public GitHub repository for just this purpose:

ArchiMate Models at GitHub

As you can see, there are only three models there at the moment (and, yes, I included that old chestnut, “Archisurance”), and GitHub doesn’t really support user ratings or comments, but maybe it’s better than nothing, and of course Git and GitHub does support versioning.

Would you like to share and upload ArchiMate models? If you’d like write access to the GitHub repository, contact us. I’m not asking you to share your company secrets by posting confidential model data, but rather to share basic model patterns, anonymised models, or even processes taken from domestic life (feeding the cat was a popular modelling exercise).

GitHub might not be the best place to share ArchiMate models, but it’s a start and, who knows, maybe one day we might have a public “ArchiMateHub” available tuned to this specific task?

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5 thoughts on “Sharing ArchiMate Models”

This is excellent – I retweeted the repo. Question for you – would the repo be focused only on Archi models? I know there are some folks using Visio stencils and even PowerPoint decks for storing their archimate compliant models. Of course using a tool is much more beneficial and Archi provides a great option. However, I am wondering if we should encourage the community to share their artifacts which are not created using Archi as well. Thoughts?

thanks for the positive response. I had only thought about including ArchiMate models In The Open Group’s Exchange Format actually. The Archi format is optional. Because the format is XML, this makes it easier to do diffs in GitHub. I would prefer not to encourage the use of Visio.

[Edit – I have re-organised the GitHub repository to better reflect the emphasis on TOG’s exchange format. I also updated the screen-shot]